Home Help: How to grow salsa

Weekly Home Help with items on how to grow the ingredients in salsa, a more sustainable bicycle helmet, the release of the Evo 3D smartphone and more.

Fresh salsa is also called pico de gallo, and it is mainly made of tomatoes, peppers, onion and cilantro –– all, of which, can be grown in your own backyard or on your patio.

Tomatoes. One of the most popular homegrown vegetables, tomatoes come in many different sizes, shapes and colors. They can be grown in the garden as well as in containers on a balcony or patio. When growing tomatoes in containers, choose a smaller variety, such as Tiny Tim or Patio Princess. Let tomatoes ripen on the vine; they should be firm and fully colored when harvested.

Peppers. For pico de gallo, use the pepper with the amount of heat that you can handle. Habanero and jalapeno peppers are hotter than bell and banana peppers. Or have a mixture of both hot and mild peppers. Peppers can be grown in containers, too. Harvest peppers when they are the desired size and color. Hot peppers are usually harvested at the red-ripe stage, but immature fruits can also be used in cooking.

Cilantro. This herb is the green foliage part of the coriander plant. Coriander is the seed that forms when plants are allowed to flower and mature. For pico de gallo, fresh cilantro is a must. It can be grown in the ground or in containers. Time the cilantro planting to coincide with the ripening tomatoes and peppers. Harvest it by cutting the abundant leaf growth before the seed stalks appear.

Onions or scallions. Typically, onions need more space and time to establish in the garden. If space is not available, chives may be substituted. Chives are a perennial herb that produces green onion-like leaves all season long. The tender leaves and stems can be harvested whenever desired during the growing season. Just snip off as many leaves as you need, and chop them.

-- University of Illinois Extension

Home-Selling Tip: Remove emotion from the sale

You may hear real estate agents refer to your new property purchase as a “home” and refer to the property you are selling as a “house.” This is because the agent wants to help remove the emotion from the sale. Although buying and selling property is often an emotional decision, you need to think of your house as a commodity on the marketplace, and help others see your “house” as their “home.”

-- RealEstateABC.com

Going Green: Student makes helmet safer, recyclable

Bicycle helmets are certainly safe for people, but they can’t be recycled and need to be thrown away after one accident. However, Anirudha Rao, a student in London, has designed a new helmet called Kranium that he hopes will be safer, more sustainable and recyclable. He uses corrugated cardboard instead of polystyrene. Tests have shown Kranium to absorb four times as much impact energy as a standard helmet.

-- Earth911.org

Did You Know …

Existing-home sales fell 3.8 percent from April to May and 15.3 percent below May 2010 numbers.

-- Realtor.org

Home Improvements: Find your taste, style

It is not uncommon to have trouble articulating your taste and style. Before hiring a decorator or getting started on a do-it-yourself project, make a sample board with fabrics, patterns and textures that you like. Such a board can help a designer pin-point your patterns of taste, and it can also help you stay organized and focused while decorating on your own.

-- HGTV.com

Garden Guide: Avoid poison hemlock

Poison hemlock grows 2 to 6 feet high and is closely related to wild carrot, aka Queen Anne's Lace. Both plants have lacy, fern-like leaves. Hemlock, however, grows much taller and has purplish spots and blotches on its hollow stems. Both plants have white flat flowers. As the name implies, poison hemlock is a very poisonous plant. In fact, it was the juice of this plant that the ancient Greeks used to poison Socrates. Many cases of human poisoning occur because the hemlock roots are mistaken for parsnips or the leaves for parsley.

-- University of Illinois Extension

New Product: HTC Evo 3D is here

The highly anticipated Evo 3D, on the Sprint network, will be released on June 24. Its main claim is a no-glasses 3-D experience for watching 3-D movies, photos and video. It also features a front-facing camera and a 1.2-gigahertz dual-core processor. However, according to the Consumer Reports Electronics blog, the phone needs to be held at a certain distance from one's eyes and at a certain angle.